


how I learned to stop worrying and love the apocalypse

by kindclaws



Series: bingo, chopped, and prompts [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Chopped: The 100 Fanfic Edition, Episode: s04e13 Praimfaya, Exes, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-01-06 16:07:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18391790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindclaws/pseuds/kindclaws
Summary: Bellamy helps her climb up the last stretch of the dropship's height. From here they can see the crater they left on the surrounding forest. The nearest trees are all blown back, their roots half-exposed in a surge of soil, their trunks blackened with soot. Looking at the graveyard of bones makes Clarke sick to her stomach so she looks up instead towards a brutal horizon. Praimfaya glows orange in the distance."Is this what you saw, the first time you died?" Bellamy asks. He looks kind of pale, but that might just be the light refracting against the visor of his radiation suit."Yeah," Clarke says, as casually as she can manage. It's a lie. It looked a lot worse from the radio dish platform, because it was closer and more terrifying and she'd just watched her closest friends explode in the sky. But it seems kinder not to say all that. At least Bellamy will deteriorate faster than her, if this Nightblood stuff works. She doesn't want to die first and leave him alone. She's been the one who lives longest and it wasn't worth it.(Actual wc is 8227 - chapter 1 and 2 are the same story in second person and third person pov respectively)





	1. second person pov

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **EDIT: Chapter 1 is the original version of this story written in Second Person Perspective for The 100 Chopped Challenge. If you can't stand Second Person POV, chapter 2 is the SAME story in Third Person. Personally, I'd still recommend the original, but YMMV and that's okay.**
> 
> Chopped Angst Round!  
> Mandatory tropes to be included:  
> 1\. Exes  
> 2\. “give up all your weapons”  
> 3\. “Lets just (kiss/hook up/whatever) to get it out of our system”  
> 4\. Groundhog day/time loop AU
> 
> I never actually watched the s4 finale bc I was annoyed by spoilers and wrote half of this before actually checking how accurate my timeline was and then made only a half-hearted effort to fix it  
> Also this fic operates on the assumption that Bellamy and Clarke got it on after writing the list of 100 Arkadian survivors.
> 
>  **CONTENT WARNINGS:** some gore/body horror, some description of medical attention, handcuffs, a Lot of repeated major character death and implied suicide. Also this is....... probably not a healthy depiction of a relationship, 0/10 would not recommend, they're a little fucked up. It is the angst challenge, after all.

 

Your name is Clarke Griffin and the apocalypse is only a handful of hours away from destroying everything you still have left to love, and the boy in the driver's seat is looking at you like he loves you and hates himself for it.

It's not the first time he's looked at you like this. It has happened so many times that they have started blurring into each other - the moment the tunnels opened and he hugged his sister and stared at you over her shoulder, his hand on yours on a lever, his pleading at the gates of a home you didn't deserve to return to anymore. Or when you begged an exiled prince to spare him, or when you refused to come home yet again, or when he signed your name on a list of survivors and the only way you could say thank you was by climbing into his lap and kissing him like you wanted to give him a lifetime's worth of air - 

It never ends, does it?

The boy in the driver's seat is looking at you like he loves you, and you are looking back at him, and neither of you sees the body until after it thumps against the hood of the rover and goes banging against the undercarriage. The whole rover goes lurching from side to side like a wounded animal hunched over prey it's too desperate to give up as bones crunch under the wheels. You're numb to the horror of it in the moment, though you're certain you'll remember this tonight, yet another death in a long list of failures attributed to you. To the ghost of Wanheda that you drag around like she's one of those cartoon lead balls attached to a leg manacle.

Bellamy hits the body and then the tree and then the Grounders come out of the underbrush and drag you all out, clawing at your radiation suits with hungry, desperate hands. And just when you think that will be that, Echo rides in with a flurry of arrows and then you all sit in the snow for a while, looking up at a sky that looks like it's being consumed by an infection and waiting for Monty and Harper to find you. It's hard to resist the urge to laugh hysterically.

It gets harder, still, when you finally get to the lab, and you find Raven, and Raven is fraying at the edges like the rest of you. If Raven is afraid, you're afraid, but you can't be afraid, because then Raven will be more afraid, but you _are_ afraid, you are so, _very_ - 

Bellamy talks to Raven. He reminds her of all the times she’s saved your asses, and you see Raven take a shaky, terrified breath, and you see the moment she straightens up with steel in her spine.

So you listen to everything she says. You climb a ladder and you are crying inside your helmet the entire time because the apocalypse is on the horizon and you already know you won't make it back in time but you think it might just be okay as long as the others all survive. You have outlived so many people who were better than you and you are probably long overdue your own death.

You bang on the radio dish as your ears pop from the oncoming shockwave and beads of sweat roll down the inside of your suit. The apocalypse is hot and fast and brutal and you are shivering in the face of it. Some background corner of your brain identifies this as an early symptom of shock and concludes that you are not as okay with your imminent demise as you are pretending to be. 

It doesn't matter anymore. You hear a rumble behind you and turn to look up at the sky just as the sleek silhouette of the rocket breaches the tree canopy. You watch it ascend, hardly daring to breathe the stale air of your suit, and you both love and hate him for taking off without you. _He'll hate himself for that, won't he?_ you think, imagining the years stretching out in front of your friends. Five years of solitude in orbit and under the ground, and then, maybe, a peaceful lifetime to resettle the earth.

The rocket tilts dangerously, and you realize something has gone terribly wrong just before it explodes. A massive fireball engulfs the middle of it. The pieces that were flung out of reach of the vaporization radius begin to fall, blazing through the sky, each one of them a burning chunk of a shattered dream.

 _Can you wish upon this kind of shooting star?_ he asks in your head.

You are still screaming, curled up on the radio platform utterly senseless with your grief, when Praimfaya reaches you. The radiation suit does not stand a chance against it.

 

 

 

 

 

Your name is Clarke Griffin and you wake up screaming at the metal ceiling of the bunker, and Niylah is leaning over you in an instant, her eyes wide and alarmed. You are not trying to hurt her but she is trying to hold you down, trying to stop you from slapping at the flames eating at your flesh, and you are still sobbing, still raw with the memory of your death when your mother rushes in.

Her hands are cold against the blaze of your cheeks. You lean into her touch like it's enough to save you, though you know it isn't. 

"Everyone's dead," you tell her between choked sobs, and she won't stop shaking her head and making these low, soothing sounds in her throat that you do not want to find comforting but you do. Jackson is hovering on the edges of your vision, you see your mother gesture at him but your mind doesn't put it together.

"We're still here, sweetheart, we're still alive," Abby says.

_Do you still have hope?_

_We're still breathing -_

  - but they're _not_ still breathing, you watched the rocket shatter in the sky, you watched Praimfaya descend upon you. You were there, you know it happened.

"The rocket exploded," you sob, trying to make your mother understand. You are feeling strangely guilty for not trying to take shelter after you finished with the radio dish, but you need your mother to understand that there was no point, that it was over, that there would never be hope again in the world. "I saw them all die, and mom, then _I_ died."

"It was a dream, sweetheart, try to calm down, please," Abby says, and she keeps looking over your shaking shoulders at Jackson. "We're safe down here."

"It wasn't a dream, I felt myself burning, mom I felt it, I died - "

The needle stings as it enters the side of your neck, but not as much as the betrayal does. Your head swims, but your mother's anxious face remains at the center of your vision. This is not the first time she has distracted you so you could be sedated when you were making a scene.

"You have to stop them," you tell her, or you try to tell her, but your tongue is thick and fuzzy in your mouth and the world tilts sideways and goes dark.

When you wake up you are absurdly thirsty and all the lights are dim and your mother is sitting slumped at the table, her back to you. You sit up and the rusty metal bedframe creaks.

"I'm sorry, Clarke," she says hoarsely, without turning around. "You won't be able to say goodbye to Bellamy."

"I know," you say dully. "He's dead."

"We don't know that for sure," Abby says. 

"I saw the rocket explode," you insist. Your head hurts from the sedative. It feels like a throbbing that originates from the center of your forehead. It feels like being trapped in solitary confinement in the Skybox for months and slamming your fists on the walls until they bled only now, your skull is the locked door. 

"Clarke, you've been out all day. That was just a bad dream," Abby says. "Octavia was talking to him on the radio just a few hours ago, until the death wave blew out our communications."

You stare.

"That was... that was yesterday," you say. "That already happened. The radio cut out and then - then I couldn't talk to you." 

You remember the grief so clearly. Bellamy's hands on your face. The look in his eyes. Like it hurt him to touch you again after you kept leaving him, but he was going to keep trying anyway. He glanced down at your lips, and maybe you were both thinking about the hard, desperate slant of his kisses after he had to sign your name for you.

"I think we should run some tests," Abby says, standing up with a frown. "Some confusion from the sedative is normal, but - "

"I'm not confused," you insist, though you kind of really are.

Your vision swims. You hit your head on the edge of the bed on your way down.

 

 

 

 

 

Your name is Clarke Griffin and you wake up and stare at the metal ceiling of the bunker. Niylah is asleep next to you, curled on her side, and you stare at her for a while too, disbelieving. 

You get up without waking her - barely remembering to put on your pants as you do – and you wander through the halls of the second dawn bunker like a ghost. It doesn’t make sense. There wasn’t enough time to get back.

You find Bellamy on the staircase leading to the door, and you don’t think before barreling forward and wrapping your arms around his waist. He flinches just a little bit, but you can’t stop yourself at that point. Too much momentum. Too much pain. The image of the rocket shattering apart in the sky above you burns in your mind’s eye. Bellamy’s arms shakily come to rest around your shoulders. The height difference of the different steps you’re standing on means that he has to bow his head to kiss the top of your head.

“I have to open this door,” he says.

“I know,” you say sadly, but it takes another moment before you’re ready to let go.

It’s not real. It can’t be real.

You hang back as Octavia leads 12 armies into the bunker and they herd all of Skaikru into the rotunda. What does it matter, now? You are hallucinating in the moments before your death, or this is an afterlife where you will relive every murder – and there have been many – on your conscience, or –

Bellamy says he’s going after Raven, and without thinking, you say you are too. He barely looks at you, just like the first time. It hurts, just like the first time. You all put on your radiation suits, Murphy and Emori climb into the back of the rover, and Bellamy drives. You want to scream, or bash your fists on the dashboard, or scream again – no, you already thought of that –

This time Bellamy swerves around the grounder that leapt out into your way. You weren’t talking, so you weren’t distracting him, so the rover skids through the snow and the grounder’s sword harmlessly scrapes against the rover’s side before Bellamy jerks the steering wheel and brings you back on the road. Behind the visor, his face is dark and furious. You clutch at the edges of your seat and say nothing as he accelerates. Grounders flash past you in the trees, shaking weapons in the air, screaming with anger and terror and the desperation that comes when you see someone else surviving instead of you. You can still hear the sound the body made when it went under your wheels.

So that was your fault.

You distracted him, so he smiled at you, so he didn’t see the grounder, so you all got ambushed. Because of you.

You say nothing all the way until you reach Becca’s lab, though your fists are shaking in your lap.

“We have to go back to the bunker,” Bellamy says. The watch on your arm tells you that you have 11 and a half hours until the death wave hits. You saved time, not having to wait for Monty and Harper to come pick you up after the first rover crashed. But the death wave sped up last time.

“We’re going to try the lighthouse,” Murphy says, his face ashen and set. Emori lurks behind him, looking angry and cornered, and you wish she had a place with your people, but you know she doesn’t. She doesn’t have a place with anyone.

“You won’t make it five years,” you tell them, but the radiation didn’t kill you as fast as it was killing everyone else last time, so when you say goodbye you give them two vials of Nightblood serum and hope it’ll be enough.

You and Bellamy and Raven are all quiet as you drive back to the bunker without them. The communications tower rises high over the treeline and you stare at it as you pass by. You remember fire. Bellamy’s hands are curled so tightly around the steering wheel that you are a little afraid you’ll have to pry them off with a crowbar when you get home. Raven looks down at the tablet in her lap and back up through the windshield.

“The deathwave is accelerating,” she says, three hours in.

“We might still make it,” Bellamy says, with the same desperation that led that grounder to jump out in front of your rover.

After another four hours, the drone monitoring the death wave from Polis goes dark. Raven smashes the tablet against the window and curls in on herself, sobbing into her gloved hands, the sound of it hollow. Bellamy keeps driving though he has to know there’s no point. You don’t say anything until you can see the wall of flame on the horizon.

Then you reach out and take his right hand off the steering wheel.

“It’s okay,” you tell him, the words getting choked up in your throat. His eyes are shining. You can see the reflection of the apocalypse in his visor. “It’s okay, we tried our best.”

You shift in your seat and reach your other hand out to Raven, and after a moment Raven reaches out to Bellamy, and you all sit in resigned silence until the fire washes over you, and that’s that.

 

 

 

 

 

Your name is Clarke Griffin and you wake up and stare at the metal ceiling of the bunker. This is the worst possible afterlife. Niylah is asleep next to you, curled on her side, but you don’t waste any more time in bed.

You get up without waking her and stride through the halls. You find Bellamy on the staircase leading to the door, a few steps lower this time. He freezes when he sees you.

“I have to open this door,” he says.

“I know,” you say hollowly. You don’t hug him this time. You don’t think you deserve it.

He still volunteers to go get Raven, and you still follow. Murphy and Emori slump together in the back. You watch Bellamy’s face as he drives.

“There’s a lot of things I never said I was sorry for,” you say.

“We can deal with them after we survive this,” he says, and that means he doesn’t want to hear you spill your heart out into his hands, so you shut up and let him drive. He dodges around the grounder attack and you crane your head back to watch the little angry figures grow smaller in the rearview mirror, shaking their weapons at the sky until it looks almost comical.

When Murphy and Emori prepare to slink away to the lighthouse bunker, you hold out a hand to stop them.

“Wait,” you say desperately. “What if we go up in the rocket?”

A myriad of complicated emotions flashes across her face. She turns to look up at it with longing and yearning and fear and confusion.

Bellamy isn’t as patient with Raven this time. You watch her curling in on herself as she works through her mental equations, tries to think of what you’re missing. You step forward and lay a hand on his shoulder.

“Bellamy, give her a minute,” you say. The clock on your wrist tells you that there’s still twelve hours, though you know it’ll be less than that. “We have time.”

So you prompt Raven along, trying to follow the script, but you’ve pushed her too hard. The life support systems in the rocket still fizzle out and spark, leaving carbon scorching along one side of the compartment.

“We have time,” you tell Raven, almost desperately, because that’s the only thing you can think of right now. “Just try your best.”

“What if that’s not good enough?” Raven cries out, slamming a wrench against the side of the rocket.

You stare at her.

 _Then this all happens again_ , you don’t say.

You go with Murphy to retrieve the oxygenator instead, since Monty isn’t here. You know he has a place in the bunker. You made one for him. But you also know Harper doesn’t, and you don’t know what to do about that.

You and Murphy pry off the cover and stare dubiously at the oxygenator. Monty had to take his gloves off for this last time, which is why you volunteered. Unlike the others, you might still survive this exposure. Murphy still starts shouting as soon as you take off your gloves, but you shut him up and tell him to pull the damn thing out. Your hands blister blue and black before you manage to pull out all the wires. You are sobbing in your helmet as you try to put the gloves back on, even though covering wounds like this goes against everything you learned in the medbay. You pick up the oxygenator through the burning pain in your fingers and know that you will have to peel the glove out of your ruined skin later.

If you survive long enough, of course. (You probably won’t survive long enough for it to matter.)

It takes you too long to get back with the oxygenator, because you can barely carry it and Murphy keeps trying to stop for you and by the time you return to the lab with it, you find out Bellamy and Raven have already gone off to the communications tower.

But he doesn’t know he has to climb to the top.

You scramble for the radio.

“Bellamy?” you ask. “Raven, can you still hear me?”

“I’m here,” she says, sounding out of breath. You are so relieved you have to press your forehead to the cold table for a moment.

“Bellamy, too?” you ask.

“He’s climbing up the tower,” Raven says. “Something’s wrong with the console down here, he’s going to try the one at the top.”

“That one won’t work either,” you say, your blood chilling in your veins. “He’ll have to adjust it manually.”

“How do you know that?” Raven asks. “Clarke – why do you keep saying things you shouldn’t know?”

“We don’t have time to explain,” you say. “I’m coming to you.”

“No, Clarke – “ Murphy says with frustration. “We still need to finish the restraints and load these rations if we’re going to survive long enough to figure out how to grow fucking algae. We need you here."

The revised clock says you have just over thirty minutes. You stare at the numbers ticking down and swear before going over to help Murphy and Emori. You slam stacks of rations down on top of each other, the packets crinkling in their foil wrappers. Emori whispers something under her breath to Murphy. You ignore them. Your head is buzzing.

Something will go wrong. Something always goes wrong.

Bellamy and Raven limp back into the lab, and it’s hard to tell which one of them is supporting the other. You drop the stack of rations you were carrying and sprint to them just as they collapse together. Raven’s face is ashen, one of her hands clutching at her damaged leg, but when you drop down to your knees to take a closer look she pushes you towards Bellamy.

“He fell, his mask cracked,” Raven says, and you undo Bellamy’s shattered helmet with shaking hands. His face is blistered like your hands, red instead of blue-black, and only one of his eyes flutters open to look blankly at you.

His breath is weak and wet. You turn him onto his side as he coughs, angling his face and neck so that the blood that comes up dribbles out the side instead of gathering in the back of his throat and choking him.

“Bellamy…” you say. You look around wildly for Murphy or Emori, whichever is closest. “Get me the nightblood serum,” you demand.

“It won’t work immediately,” Raven reminds you, with tears trailing openly down both sides of her face.

“We have to try,” you say, and when Murphy brings you the needle you stab it into the side of Bellamy's neck. He makes a pained sound and starts coughing more, his hands scrambling weakly at you.

"It's okay," he says with blood trailing from the corner of his mouth, his one eye unfocused as he stares in your general direction. "Clarke, it's okay. I'll see you in the morning."

You kiss him and he’s too weak to kiss back. He’s dead by the time the rocket lifts off, but you have him strapped in at your side anyway, just in case, just in case –

When his head lolls against his chest and doesn’t rise again, you stare at him instead of the apocalypse through the porthole window.

 

 

 

 

 

Your name is Clarke Griffin and you wake up furious, though at least your hands are no longer burning in agony. The bed creaks as you climb out and ignore the soft sounds of Niylah stirring. You stomp down the hallways of the bunker, dodging the few stragglers who are awake at this hour, and walk straight into Bellamy. He reaches out to balance you instinctively, his warm hand wrapping around your wrist. He lets go just as quickly. 

"What the fuck did you mean?" you demand. His eyes widen.

"What?"

"You said you'd see me in the morning."

For a moment neither of you dare to breathe. You are a collection of wax statues, nearly life-like, going through the motions of a human day.

"You remember?"

“Have you been repeating this day just like me?” you say, barely above a whisper. You don’t know what answer you want. If he says yes – then you’re not alone, then maybe you’re not going crazy. If he says no then he’s seen you die as many times as you’ve had to watch him die, and you don’t – you wouldn’t wish that on anyone, much less –

“We have to go,” he says, shaking his head. “Come on, Raven’s waiting for us.”

“You _are_ repeating it,” you insist, following at his side.

“We can talk about it in the rover,” he says, but once you’re behind the wheel you don’t know what to say anymore.

“I had to watch you die,” you say eventually, and you see him flinch behind his visor.

“I had to take off without you,” he says dully. “That first time. That was the worst, because I thought it was permanent.”

“The dish was broken,” you explain.

“I know now,” he says ruefully. He turns to smile at you, and he doesn’t see the grounder that jumps out onto the road ahead of you. The body goes banging under the rover and Bellamy swerves into a tree. The other grounders swarm you and you leap out of the rover with your heart in your throat as Bellamy is dragged out.

“Wait, please,” you beg as hands scramble at Bellamy’s radiation suit. “Please, don’t do this – “

“It’s Wanheda!” one of them cries out, and that name never stops feeling like splinters under your fingernails. Someone wraps their arm around your neck and jerks your head back. The seal of your helmet stretches to its limit in their grasp. You kick backwards, try to stomp your heel into their feet, and they dodge all of your attempts and slam your head into the side of the rover for good measure. A vicious crack spiderwebs across the corner of your helmet and you want to scream with frustration. These fucking helmets are _shit_.

Bellamy is yelling for them to stop, a background cacophony of worry for you, but it’s hard to pick out individual words over the roaring of your pulse in your ears. The grounder that has you captive forces you to your knees. You let your legs collapse underneath you and scramble weakly at the arm keeping your chin forced up.

“Drop your weapons,” an unfamiliar voice snarls. “Drop your weapons or we kill her.”

“They can’t – “ you try to wheeze. Bellamy’s silhouette swims in front of your eyes, but he’s handing everything over without a thought – his handgun, the spare ammunition in his pockets, the knives tucked into his boots, the handaxe tucked into the back of his belt. _Idiot_ , you think to yourself, even as you’re impressed by the significant arsenal he managed to hide on himself. “They can’t kill me,” you manage to get out.

“I’m not watching you die again, Clarke,” Bellamy says, sounding nearly as strangled as you.

“ _Again_?” Murphy asks quietly from where he’s pinned to the ground with a sword to his neck.

Bellamy flinches when one of the grounders patting him down for extra weapons finds a butterfly knife hidden in a strap along his arm and cuffs him in the back of the helmet for not handing it over.

“Skaikru won’t let Wanheda die,” the grounder holding your neck up says confidently. “We’ll take her, we can use her to barter for spots in the bunker.”

“Absolutely not,” Bellamy says, stepping forward with a snarl. _Goddammit, you’re unarmed_ , you think to yourself, dazed by the limited air your captor is allowing you. It’s a relief when the arm around your neck relaxes and rough hands haul you up by your suit instead.

“Just go, Bellamy,” you gasp out. “Call Harper and Monty, take care of Raven - if the rocket isn’t damaged, no one needs to go to the tower – “

“Is this some kind of code?” Murphy asks.

“Clarke – “ Bellamy starts, involuntarily trailing after you as the grounders drag you away.

“It’s okay – “ you promise, and then a heavy blow to the helmet makes the visor splinter further and knocks you unconscious. Your last glimpse of him is refracted in a hundred tiny shards of glass.

You wake up, hours later, to your mother’s hands frantically wiping blood away from your mouth and nostrils. The pool of black blood underneath your head tells you that the radiation exposure on the way to Polis doesn’t sit well with your stomach.

“Clarke, honey, how do you feel?” Abby asks. She pushes you back on your side when you try to sit up, and you haven’t got the strength to fight her. Your face aches and burns.

“The nightblood might still work,” you slur, certain that at one point, it was very important to tell her this. “Mom, we have to pull in as many people as we can into the bunker, give everyone nightblood. We only have to stay here until the death wave – “

“Clarke,” your mother says, gently, her eyes shining with grief and unshed tears. “It’s already come.”

You cry yourself back to sleep and the salt stings in every blister on your face.

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes you give up on outrunning the apocalypse for a day and you go back to the beginning. It’s easy to slip away during the chaos that Octavia’s ultimatum to Skaikru causes, and every time you die you feel a little more numb to the thought of your friends and mother and people worrying themselves over where you’ve disappeared to. 

By late morning the ash has already started falling as gently as snow. The tiny green shoots that had sprung up in the gaps between scorched bones start to wither away from the incoming radiation. Underneath the yellowed leaves the skulls of a few hundred warriors glare balefully at you. 

Bellamy helps you climb up the last stretch of the dropship's height. It's easier to scramble up and sit down at his side when the slope evens out into the dropship's domed cap. From here you can see the crater you've left on the surrounding forest. The nearest trees are all blown back, their roots half-exposed in a surge of soil, their trunks blackened with soot. It's hard to tell what part of the damage is from the dropship's initial impact and what part is from the explosion you and Raven and Jasper set off.

Looking at the graveyard of bones exposed by the withered clover makes you sick to your stomach so you look up instead, over the tops of the surrounding trees towards a brutal horizon. Praimfaya glows orange in the distance.

"Is this what you saw, the first time today happened?" Bellamy asks. He looks kind of pale, but that might just be the light refracting against the visor of his radiation suit.

"Yeah," you say, as casually as you can manage. It's a lie. It looked a lot worse from the radio dish platform, because it was closer and more terrifying and you'd just watched your closest friends explode in the sky. But it seems kinder not to say all that, and you are trying very hard to be a kinder person.

"I can't believe I left you," he whispers.

You don't want to talk about this, so you take off your helmet. The release clicks beneath your fingers and air hisses through the crack. Bellamy makes a strangled sound of worry as your braid tumbles out down your back.

"It's fine," you say, blinking away the sting at your eyes. "We have a while until the radiation becomes fatal. Besides, I brought lunch."

The skin on your knuckles cracks as you take your gloves off and rummage in your pack. Bellamy hesitates until you take out a few strips of smoked meat, a jar of tiny red tomatoes, and some cheese that starts to crumble in its cloth as you unwrap it and set it on the slope of the dropship between you.

Bellamy takes off his own helmet. His nostrils flare at the initial sting of the radiation on his exposed skin and the first breath makes him cough. You can feel the back of your own throat struggling with the air and it annoys you. You were really hoping to be able to taste your picnic before you start vomiting up blood, but the universe won't give you nice things.

At least Bellamy will deteriorate faster than you, if this Nightblood stuff works. You don't want to die first and leave him alone. You've been the one who lives longest and it wasn't worth it.

You eat your picnic, each of you picking at it in small bites, as the roar of Praimfaya grows brighter and closer. It looks like a towering wall of flame, slowly sweeping the globe. Your knuckles start to bleed, and the Nightblood still looks weird to you - the blue-black of your skin, each fresh wound looking like a terrible bruise. You shift closer to Bellamy. His face is starting to blister and he looks terrible. You imagine you do too, but he still turns his head to look at you like he loves you and hates himself for it.

That’s something you two don’t really talk about. The urgency of imminent death loses its effect when you endure it so many times and part of you wishes the danger still felt real because then maybe it would push you to actually _talk_ about it, about what broke between you, about why he’s the only person you’d want to be trapped reliving this hell with.

"I want to kiss you again," you whisper instead. You don't care if your lips are cracked and bleeding and it'll hurt. You just know this is where you want to be, at the end of the world.

"You aimed a gun at me," he says, and you pull away because you think that probably means _no_ , but his blistering, shaking hands fist in the collar of your suit and pull you closer. You climb into his lap and smash your mouths together and it really is awful. You're dying and it hurts and you want him and it's never the right time. He kisses you back anyway.

He's still kissing you as you grope along his waistband and pull out the gun in his belt. If he notices you press it between his third and fourth ribs, where the bullet will sever the aorta and give him a quick passing, he doesn't give any sign of it. You wait as long as you can until you taste blood in his mouth, and then you pull the trigger.

The irony is not lost on you.

You lie back next to his body and your body is on the verge of pulmonary shutdown so you can't really scream at the sky like you want to but you kick your feet and slam your fists against the dome of the dropship until the metal is slippery with black blood and it's good enough for now.

You wanted more time, but not like this. 

 

 

 

 

 

This time when you wake up and make your way to Bellamy, he grabs you by the wrist and drags you into the nearest room. The door clicks behind you and he crowds you up against it. 

"I am getting," he growls as he snaps a pair of handcuffs around your wrists and attaches you to a hook on the door before you can protest, " _Really_   fucking sick of you aiming guns at me."

You rattle the handcuffs experimentally, but the hook keeps your hands pinned up above your head and you're not quite tall enough to slip the chain between the cuffs off. You eye it, half impressed, half irritated. 

"And this is the second time you've handcuffed me, so I guess we're even now," you say.

"You're staying handcuffed until we can have a proper conversation," Bellamy says. He paces back and forth in front of you, his gesturing hands making sharp motions through the air. "No guns, no apocalypse, no whiskey."

"Sure," you say, a little hysterically. "We have nothing but time!"

"None of... _that_ , either," Bellamy says, waving vaguely. "For God's sake, Clarke. How long has it been since we had a real, honest conversation?"

_Too long._

"I don't know," you say, and you start to cry, because you're not sure what he wants from you but you want to give it but you can't give it if you don't know what it is and what if you haven't got it anymore, what if this stupid fucking time loop is scraping you up on the inside and leaving you a hollow, hysterical - 

"Clarke - " Bellamy says, and then he starts to cry too.

"I'm sorry," you say, and you're sorry for _all_ of it. For closing the dropship door, for sending him to Mount Weather with the sharp bite of your fake apathy, for leaving him, for not coming home when he asked, for the breakdown of trust that put you on opposite sides of a battle. You say it all through choked breaths.

"I'm sorry too," Bellamy says and he crosses the room to embrace you in a few long strides. He buries his face in your hair like he did when you both found out the other was alive, after the dropship fire, after you escaped from Mount Weather, and you press the line of your body along his, trying to get as close as the handcuffs will allow. His hands are broad and blazing with heat against your back. You want your hands on him too, you want him to feel the burning trail of your touch like you do.

"Let me go, I want to kiss you," you murmur into his cheek, and he lifts up his head from the nest of your hair. His nose brushes yours as he stares at your eyes. You could kiss him so easily. His breath spills over your chin. You already know how he'd feel, how he'd taste, how he'd groan into your mouth if you closed the distance. But you need him to trust you. You are not going to keep your sanity intact through the long, endless unraveling of the universe if you are not on the same side, so you keep still even as he removes one hand from the small of your back and tentatively cups your cheek with it. You don't lean into his palm. You don't whimper when his thumb drags along your bottom lip. 

"So kiss me," he dares you.

"You broke up with me," you retort.

"You aimed a gun at me," he reminds you. "And back then, as far as we knew, murder was permanent."

“I didn’t pull the trigger,” you say, the same thing you said the first time. Bellamy’s unimpressed, flat smile tells you it’s not going to be enough this time. You slam your head back against the metal door. The impact makes your teeth ache. "What do you want, Bellamy?" you ask, trying not to let your frustration seep into your voice. 

"Ask,” he says.

“Kiss me,” you say, holding your chin up defiantly and hoping you don’t sound like you’re begging. You’ve begged enough, when you thought there was no other choice, but the idea that you might be stuck here together for the rest of eternity with nothing but the ongoing memory of all the ways you’ve hurt each other makes you a little resistant.

Bellamy steps closer.

“Why?” he murmurs. His hand comes up and trails along your jaw. You shiver.

"Just to get it out of our system,” you say, like an idiot, instead of the truth, instead of _I miss you so much I’m kind of glad you’re in hell with me_ or _I love you, I’m sorry, I never should have done the things that I’ve done_ , or _I forgave you, once, at the base of a tree with blood on our hands, when I didn’t know you, and I know you now, and I want your forgiveness now, I want it all –_

You see Bellamy’s eyes shutter in pain.

It was the wrong answer, but you’re still burning with anger that he gave up all his weapons, that he put himself in danger for you.

He stares at you for a while. His palm is pressed into the cold metal door beside your head, and you can feel the warmth of his wrist so close to your cheek.

“Bellamy,” you say quietly. “We can go back to saving the world tomorrow. Today, can we just… can we just have this? I want you.”

“Just to get it out of our system,” he repeats, his tone sharp and sarcastic, and you flinch. Did it hurt him to hear it as much as it hurts you? Before you can ask, he takes the remaining half-step forward and smooths his hand along your cheek. You tilt your mouth up greedily as he presses his thigh into the cradle of your hips and his other arm slips around your back, pulling you flush with him.

You kiss him as long as he lets you, straining against the handcuffs keeping your arms pinned. You want to hold him like you used to. You had so little time together, so little opportunity to see what love could mean together when you weren’t trying to keep people alive.

“Let me go,” you murmur into his mouth.

“Why?” Bellamy asks.

“Because I want to hold you,” you say, sounding wrecked, and maybe that’s a good enough answer right now because he unhooks your wrists and releases the lock. You let the cuffs fall away, clattering to the floor as you throw your arms around him and kiss him again. Your weight makes you both stumble backwards, onto the couch. You end up in his lap, kissing his jaw, scrambling at his shirt and his belt. His hands, equally desperate, don’t rest until you’re both mostly naked and out of breath, curled together on the couch.

You reach for his hand. He hesitates for a moment, and then gives it to you. You squeeze his fingers gratefully.

"What day would you repeat, if you could choose?" you ask.

"The day everyone got high on Jobi nuts," Bellamy says sleepily. “I’m sorry we missed most of it.”

Jobi nuts aren’t the part of that day that stand out the most to you, but you crack a smile anyway. It makes you warm, that he would pick a day he spent mostly with you.

"Dax might still be feeling murder-y,” you joke.

"We'd get him high too,” Bellamy says with barely a hint of hesitation.

"Sounds like a pain,” you say with a laugh, burying your face in Bellamy’s shoulder. You kiss the freckles there and press your cheek against him before fondly reaching up to push some hair out of his eyes. “Having to foil attempted murder every single morning."

"Easier than an entire apocalypse."

The warmth leaves you, and does not return for the rest of the day.

 

 

 

 

 

"You know what I like about Praimfaya?" you ask distractedly, watching the last flock of birds try to flee across the sky. 

"What?" Bellamy asks. This time you took a detour on your way to the dropship to pick up some whiskey from that half-buried car you and Wells and Finn took shelter in, a million lifetimes ago. Bellamy holds the neck of the bottle loosely between three fingers and takes a swig. You are starting to take that detour more and more often, and you think you should say something, but you were secretly glad when Bellamy turned the steering wheel towards it this morning without asking.

"No levers," you say.

It's not supposed to be that funny, but Bellamy laughs so hard that he slides down the domed cap of the dropship and breaks his neck in the fall, and you look down at the angle of his body and figure you may as well end the day early too.

 

 

 

 

 

Your name is Clarke Griffin and you wake up next to Niylah and don't bother saying goodbye to her before walking out and finding Bellamy halfway between your rooms.  

"It wasn't that funny," is the first thing you say to him, in a fairly accusing tone, much to the confusion of a passing stranger.

Bellamy just shrugs. 

"Wanna try and save the world this time?" he asks, and you agree because trying to drink yourself to death before your skin starts blistering is getting kind of old and you may as well change it up.

It’s been a while since you two actually put some effort into surviving the death wave, so naturally, it takes you several tries to remind yourselves of the fragile timeline. The future stretches out before you like the roots of a tree, twisting and branching off in the blink of an eye, pruned back before the clock can get too far ahead. You and Bellamy walk a tightrope between those futures, trying to stay ahead of the dangers that snap at your heels.

Allowing the initial grounder ambush to happen doesn’t leave you with enough time to prepare the rocket, even if you radio Raven to start her pre-flight checks before you’ve left Polis, so you can’t afford to lose time there, but you two decide that a several hour detour to meet up with Harper and Monty is worth the cost of every minute.

A careful word and a significant glance to Harper sends her to lurk over Raven’s shoulder as she works, and Harper’s soft and firm brand of empathy convinces Raven to take a breather just before her frantic last-minute adjustments to the rocket go wrong. The communications system doesn’t blow up in her face, and Raven’s confident this means they can start the power in the ring from within the rocket.

Bellamy gets that familiar twitch in his jaw when you argue that you can afford to expose your hands to the radiation more than Monty can, but you’re right – and you’ve had a long time to think about it – so he doesn’t try to stop you from following Murphy to the lighthouse bunker, though he does look pained every time you return with blistered, blackened hands.

Emori helps you strap into your seat in the rocket when your hands are too ruined to fasten the restraints. She gives your hands a significant look and says, “Now you understand,” before settling into her own seat on the opposite side of the cockpit. Bellamy takes the spot on your left and closes his eyes when Raven begins the takeoff sequence. You watch the hangar bay doors close with a rumble and a feeling in your stomach that is halfway between zero-g nausea and just regular nausea.

You’re on the wrong side of those doors more often than you’re not, which is why Bellamy can’t look at them anymore.

You reach out to the side blindly, your blistered skin sending spasms of pain up your arm wherever your gloves brush the side of the rocket. Bellamy reaches for you instinctively as the rocket rumbles beneath you, hesitating at the last minute when he remembers your hands. You don’t care. You grab for him anyway, and you hang on through the pain.

The take off rattles all the teeth in your head. You can hear Raven’s panicked breathing over the groan of metal and the ignition of fuel beneath you, and part of you wants to tell her to conserve her breath because you can buy her time but not more air, but if you die up in the ring – hey, whatever, you can try again and again and again. Not like you’ve got anything better to do.

You start laughing hysterically as the Earth grows smaller and smaller in the porthole window, until you can see the curve of it, until you can watch the death wave smother one continent after another. You thought it was big and awful and terrifying from the ground, from its warpath. It’s worse from the sky, but less personal. You look at the Earth burning up and you feel your brain settle into that calm, numb state it goes in when you have a patient on your table that you’re not sure you can save. It’s the state of mind a doctor needs to cut off limbs and cauterize wounds without flinching and dig out an infection without the urge to retch.

Bellamy is staring out the porthole window with a hollow look on his face too, but you know he’s lived enough guilt for a hundred lifetimes or more. You squeeze his hand through the pain until he looks away from it and you smile at him. You are a very good liar by now; you have had lots of practice to convince people that things will turn out okay, that you know something they don’t and you have it under control.

There’s no one on this planet – or in orbit around it – that can tell when you’re lying more easily than Bellamy.

You push the burning Earth out of your mind and focus on the future, on Raven’s spacewalk, on helping her guide the rocket pod into the ring. You all tumble out in a pile of adrenaline and relief and the lightheadedness that comes with reduced oxygen. You’re useless now, with your hands, you’ve done your part, so you just unhook your oxygen and give it to Emori to give to Raven while Monty and the others scramble to install the oxygenator.

The air, when it comes, is the sweetest thing you’ve ever tasted. Nevermind that it’s stale and artificial and for a few glorious months you got to breathe in the scent of a forest all around you. You and Bellamy have spent most of the last eternity in your goddamn radiation suits, breathing recycled air or breathing in the apocalypse. You start to cry on the floor of the ark and Bellamy cradles your head in his lap.

“I want it to be over,” you say between sobs. “I want to try tomorrow now.”

“I know,” he says, pressing kisses to your forehead. “Me too, I know, god – “

This is the furthest you’ve ever gotten. It has to count for something.

“Bellamy,” you gasp, still giddy from your near-suffocation. “I love you – “

“I love you too,” he whispers against your skin, and it’s wonderful until Murphy throws his helmet at you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your name is Clarke Griffin and you wake up and stare at a metal ceiling. Someone is breathing quietly beside you, the slow rhythm of air telling you they're still asleep. You hesitate before turning your head to see who it is.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up to you to decide whether the metal ceiling in the last morning is in the second dawn bunker as the beginning of yet another loop, or if it's the ceiling in the Ark and they broke out of it. 
> 
> I'm not particularly pleased with this but hey if I didn't post it now, I wasn't ever going to. Echo is... somewhere? Idk. I don't hate her but if they were making an effort to avoid the grounder ambush so that they had enough time to take off, I didn't really know where to add her to the ensemble and wasn't motivated enough to find a solution. *shrug emoji*
> 
> Title modified from the 1964 film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. I do not recommend watching the movie because it's "a product of its time" and will probably make you angry, but the title's catchy.


	2. third person pov

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **EDIT: Chapter 1 is the original version of this story written in Second Person Perspective for The 100 Chopped Challenge. If you can't stand Second Person POV, chapter 2 is the SAME story in Third Person. Personally, I'd still recommend the original, but YMMV and that's okay.**
> 
>  
> 
> Chopped Angst Round!  
> Mandatory tropes to be included:  
> 1\. Exes  
> 2\. “give up all your weapons”  
> 3\. “Lets just (kiss/hook up/whatever) to get it out of our system”  
> 4\. Groundhog day/time loop AU
> 
> I never actually watched the s4 finale bc I was annoyed by spoilers and wrote half of this before actually checking how accurate my timeline was and then made only a half-hearted effort to fix it  
> Also this fic operates on the assumption that Bellamy and Clarke got it on after writing the list of 100 Arkadian survivors.
> 
>  **CONTENT WARNINGS:** some gore/body horror, some description of medical attention, handcuffs, a Lot of repeated major character death and implied suicide. Also this is....... probably not a healthy depiction of a relationship, 0/10 would not recommend, they're a little fucked up. It is the angst challenge, after all.

 

The apocalypse is only a handful of hours away from destroying everything Clarke Griffin still has left to love, and the boy in the driver's seat is looking at her like he loves her and hates himself for it.

It's not the first time he's looked at her like this. It has happened so many times that they have started blurring into each other - the moment the tunnels opened and he stared at Clarke over his sister's shoulder, his hand on hers on a lever, his pleading at the gates of a home she didn't deserve to return to anymore. Or when Clarke begged an exiled prince to spare him, or when she refused to come home yet again, or when he signed her name on a list of survivors and the only way she could say thank you was by climbing into his lap and kissing him like she wanted to give him a lifetime's worth of air - 

It never ends, does it?

The boy in the driver's seat is looking at Clarke like he loves her, and she is looking back at him, and neither of them sees the body until after it thumps against the hood of the rover and goes banging against the undercarriage. The whole rover lurches from side to side like a wounded animal hunched over prey it's too desperate to give up as bones crunch under the wheels. Clarke's numb to the horror of it in the moment, though she's certain she'll remember this tonight, yet another death in a long list of failures attributed to her. To the ghost of Wanheda that she still drags around like she's one of those cartoon lead balls attached to a leg manacle.

Bellamy hits the body and then the tree and then the Grounders come out of the underbrush and drag everyone out, clawing at their radiation suits with hungry, desperate hands. And just when Clarke think that will be that, Echo rides in with a flurry of arrows and then they all sit in the snow for a while, looking up at a sky that looks like it's being consumed by an infection as they wait for Monty and Harper to catch up. It's hard to resist the urge to laugh hysterically.

It gets harder, still, when they finally get to the lab, and Clarke finds Raven, and Raven is fraying at the edges like the rest of them. If Raven is afraid, Clarke is afraid, but Clarke can't be afraid, because then Raven will be more afraid, but she  _is_  afraid, she is so,  _very_  - 

Bellamy talks to Raven. He reminds her of all the times she’s saved your asses, and Raven takes a shaky, terrified breath, and Clarke sees the moment she straightens up with steel in her spine.

So they listen to everything Raven says. Clarke climbs a ladder and she is crying inside her helmet the entire time because the apocalypse is on the horizon and she already knows she won't make it back in time but she thinks it might just be okay as long as the others all survive. She has outlived so many people who were better than her and she is probably long overdue her own death. She bangs on the radio dish as her ears pop from the oncoming shockwave and beads of sweat roll down the inside of her suit. The apocalypse is hot and fast and brutal and she is shivering in the face of it. Some background corner of her brain identifies this as an early symptom of shock and concludes that she is not as okay with her imminent demise as she is pretending to be. 

It doesn't matter anymore. Clarke hears a rumble behind her and turns to look up at the sky just as the sleek silhouette of the rocket breaches the tree canopy. She watches it ascend, hardly daring to breathe the stale air of her suit, and she both loves and hates him for taking off without her.  _He'll hate himself for that, won't he?_   she thinks, imagining the years stretching out in front of them. Five years of solitude in orbit and under the ground, and then, maybe, a peaceful lifetime to resettle the earth.

The rocket tilts dangerously, and she realizes something has gone terribly wrong just before it explodes. A massive fireball engulfs the center. The pieces that were flung out of reach of the vaporization radius begin to fall, blazing through the sky, each one of them a burning chunk of a shattered dream.

_Can you wish upon this kind of shooting star?_   he asks in her head.

Clarke is still screaming, curled up on the radio platform utterly senseless with her grief, when Praimfaya reaches her. The radiation suit does not stand a chance against it.

 

 

 

 

 

Clarke Griffin wakes up screaming at the metal ceiling of the bunker, and Niylah is leaning over her in an instant, eyes wide and alarmed. Clarke is not trying to hurt her but Niylah pins her down, trying to stop her from slapping at the flames eating at her flesh, and Clarke is still fighting back, still sobbing, still raw with the memory of her death when her mother rushes in.

Abby's hands are cold against the blaze of her cheeks. Clarke leans into her touch like it's enough to save her, though she knows it isn't. 

"Everyone's dead," she tells them between choked sobs, and Abby won't stop shaking her head and making these low, soothing sounds in her throat that Clarke does not want to find comforting but does anyway. Jackson hovers on the edges of her vision. Clarke sees her mother gesture at him but her mind doesn't put it together.

"We're still here, sweetheart, we're still alive," Abby says.

_Do you still have hope?_

_We're still breathing -_

  - but they're  _not_  still breathing, she watched the rocket shatter in the sky, she watched Praimfaya descend upon her. Clarke was there, she knows it happened.

"The rocket exploded," she sobs, trying to make her mother understand. Clarke is feeling strangely guilty for not trying to take shelter after she finished with the radio dish, but she needs her mother to understand that there was no point, that it was over, that there would never be hope again in the world. "I saw them all die, and mom, then  _I_  died."

"It was a dream, sweetheart, try to calm down, please," Abby says, and she keeps looking over Clarke's shaking shoulders at Jackson. "We're safe down here."

"It wasn't a dream, I felt myself burning, mom I felt it, I died - "

The needle stings as it enters the side of her neck, but not as much as the betrayal does. Clarke's head swims, but her mother's anxious face remains at the center of her vision. This is not the first time she has distracted her daughter so she could be sedated when she was making a scene.

"You have to stop them," Clarke tells her, or tries to tell her, but her tongue is thick and fuzzy in her mouth and the world tilts sideways and goes dark.

When she wakes up she is absurdly thirsty and all the lights are dim and her mother is sitting slumped at the table, facing away. Clarke sits up and the rusty metal bedframe creaks.

"I'm sorry, Clarke," Abby says hoarsely, without turning around. "You won't be able to say goodbye to Bellamy."

"I know," she says dully. "He's dead."

"We don't know that for sure," Abby says. 

"I saw the rocket explode," Clarke insists. Her head hurts from the sedative. It feels like a throbbing that originates from the center of her forehead. It feels like being trapped in solitary confinement in the Skybox for months and slamming her fists on the walls until they bled did. Only now, the locked door is her own skull. 

"Clarke, you've been out all day. That was just a bad dream," Abby says. "Octavia was talking to him on the radio just a few hours ago, until the death wave blew out our communications."

She stares.

"That was... that was yesterday," Clarke says. "That already happened. The radio cut out and then - then I couldn't talk to you." 

She remembers the grief so clearly. Bellamy's hands on her face. The look in his eyes. Like it hurt him to touch her again after she kept leaving him, but he was going to keep trying anyway. He glanced down at her lips, and maybe they were both thinking about the hard, desperate slant of his kisses after he had to sign her name on that list.

"I think we should run some tests," Abby says, standing up with a frown. "Some confusion from the sedative is normal, but - "

"I'm not confused," Clarke insists, though she kind of really is.

Her vision swims. She hits her head on the edge of the bed on her way down.

 

 

 

 

 

Clarke Griffin wakes up and stares at the metal ceiling of the bunker. Niylah is asleep next to her, curled on her side, and Clarke stares at her for a while too, disbelieving. 

She gets up without waking Niylah - barely remembering to put on her pants as she does – and she wanders through the halls of the second dawn bunker like a ghost. It doesn’t make sense. There wasn’t enough time to get back.

Clarke finds Bellamy on the staircase leading to the door, and she doesn’t think before barreling forward and wrapping her arms around his waist. He flinches just a little bit, but she can’t stop herself at that point. Too much momentum. Too much pain. The image of the rocket shattering apart in the sky above her burns in her mind’s eye. Bellamy’s arms shakily come to rest around her shoulders. The height difference of the staircase they’re standing on means that he has to bow his head to kiss the top of her head.

“I have to open this door,” he says.

“I know,” she says sadly, but it takes another moment before she's ready to let go.

It’s not real. It can’t be real.

Clarke hangs back as Octavia leads twelve armies into the bunker and they herd all of Skaikru into the rotunda. What does it matter, now? She is hallucinating in the moments before her death, or this is an afterlife where she will relive every murder – and there have been many – on her conscience, or –

Bellamy says he’s going after Raven, and without thinking, Clarke says she is too. He barely looks at her, just like the first time. It hurts, just like the first time. Everyone puts on their radiation suits, Murphy and Emori climb into the back of the rover, and Bellamy drives. Clarke wants to scream, or bash her fists on the dashboard, or scream again – no, she already thought of that –

This time Bellamy swerves around the grounder that leapt out into their way. They weren’t talking, so she wasn’t distracting him, so the rover skids through the snow and the grounder’s sword harmlessly scrapes against the rover’s side before Bellamy jerks the steering wheel and brings them back on the road. Behind the visor, his face is dark and furious. Clarke clutches at the edges of her seat and says nothing as he accelerates. Grounders flash past them in the trees, shaking weapons in the air, screaming with anger and terror and the desperation that comes when you see someone else surviving instead of you. Clarke can still hear the sound the body made when it went under the wheels.

So that was her fault.

She distracted him, so he smiled at her, so he didn’t see the grounder, so they all got ambushed. Because of her.

Clarke says nothing all the way until they reach Becca’s lab, though her fists are shaking in her lap.

“We have to go back to the bunker,” Bellamy says. The watch on Clarke's arm tells her that they have 11 and a half hours until the death wave hits. They saved time, not having to wait for Monty and Harper to come pick them up after the first rover crashed. But the death wave sped up last time. It probably will now too.

“We’re going to try the lighthouse,” Murphy says, his face ashen and set. Emori lurks behind him, looking angry and cornered, and Clarke wishes she had a place with her people, but knows she doesn’t. Emori doesn’t have a place with anyone.

“You won’t make it five years,” Clarke tells them, but the radiation didn’t kill her as fast as it was killing everyone else last time, so when they say goodbye she gives them two vials of Nightblood serum and hopes it’ll be enough.

She and Bellamy and Raven are all quiet as they drive back to the bunker without them. The communications tower rises high over the treeline and Clarke stares at it as they pass by. She remembers fire. Bellamy’s hands are curled so tightly around the steering wheel that Clarke is a little afraid she’ll have to pry them off with a crowbar when they get home. Raven looks down at the tablet in her lap and back up through the windshield.

“The deathwave is accelerating,” Raven says, three hours in.

“We might still make it,” Bellamy says, with the same desperation that led that grounder to jump out in front of their rover.

After another four hours, the drone monitoring the death wave from Polis goes dark. Raven smashes the tablet against the window and curls in on herself, sobbing into her gloved hands, the sound of it hollow. Bellamy keeps driving though he has to know there’s no point. Clarke doesn’t say anything until she can see the wall of flame on the horizon.

Then she reaches out and take his right hand off the steering wheel.

“It’s okay,” Clarke says, the words getting choked up in her throat. His eyes are shining. She can see the reflection of the apocalypse in his visor. “It’s okay, we tried our best.”

She shifts in her seat and reaches her other hand out to Raven, and after a moment Raven reaches out to Bellamy, and they all sit in resigned silence until the fire washes over them, and that’s that.

 

 

 

 

 

Clarke Griffin wakes up and stares at the metal ceiling of the bunker. This is the worst possible afterlife. Niylah is asleep next to her, curled on her side, but Clarke doesn’t waste any more time in bed.

She gets up without waking Niylah and strides through the halls. She finds Bellamy on the staircase leading to the door, a few steps lower this time. He freezes when he sees her.

“I have to open this door,” he says.

“I know,” Clarke says hollowly. She doesn’t hug him this time. She doesn’t think she deserves it.

He still volunteers to go get Raven, and Clarke still follows. Murphy and Emori slump together in the back. She watches Bellamy’s face as he drives.

“There’s a lot of things I never said I was sorry for,” she says.

“We can deal with them after we survive this,” he says, and that means he doesn’t want to hear her spill her heart out into his hands, so she shuts up and lets him drive. He dodges around the grounder attack and Clarke cranes her head back to watch the little angry figures grow smaller in the rearview mirror, shaking their weapons at the sky until it looks almost comical.

When Murphy and Emori prepare to slink away to the lighthouse bunker, Clarke holds out a hand to stop them.

“Wait,” she says desperately. “What if we go up in the rocket?”

A myriad of complicated emotions flashes across Emori's face. She turns to look up at it with longing and yearning and fear and confusion.

Bellamy isn’t as patient with Raven this time. Clarke watches her curling in on herself as she works through her mental equations, tries to think of what they’re missing. Clarke steps forward and lays a hand on his shoulder.

“Bellamy, give her a minute,” she says. The clock on her wrist tells her that there’s still twelve hours, though she knows it’ll be less than that. “We have time.”

So Clarke prompts Raven along, trying to follow the script, but they’ve pushed her too hard. The life support systems in the rocket still fizzle out and spark, leaving carbon scorching along one side of the compartment.

“We have time,” she tells Raven, almost desperately, because that’s the only thing she can think of right now. “Just try your best.”

“What if that’s not good enough?” Raven cries out, slamming a wrench against the side of the rocket.

Clarke stares at her.

_Then this all happens again_ , she doesn’t say.

She goes with Murphy to retrieve the oxygenator instead, since Monty isn’t here. Clarke knows he has a place in the bunker. She made one for him. But she also knows Harper doesn’t, and she doesn’t know what to do about that.

Together she and Murphy pry off the cover and stare dubiously at the oxygenator. Monty had to take his gloves off for this last time, which is why Clarke volunteered. Unlike the others, she might still survive this exposure. Murphy still starts shouting as soon as she takes off her gloves, but she shuts him up and tells him to pull the damn thing out. Her hands blister blue and black before they manage to pull out all the wires. Clarke is sobbing in your helmet as she tries to put the gloves back on, even though covering wounds like this goes against everything she learned in the medbay. She picks up the oxygenator through the burning pain in her fingers and knows that she will have to peel the glove out of her ruined skin later.

If they survive long enough, of course. (They probably won’t survive long enough for it to matter.)

It takes them too long to get back with the oxygenator, because Clarke can barely carry it and Murphy keeps trying to stop for her and by the time they return to the lab with it, they find out Bellamy and Raven have already gone off to the communications tower.

But he doesn’t know he has to climb to the top.

Clarke scrambles for the radio.

“Bellamy?” she asks. “Raven, can you still hear me?”

“I’m here,” Raven says, sounding out of breath. Clarke is so relieved she has to press her forehead to the cold table for a moment.

“Bellamy, too?” she asks.

“He’s climbing up the tower,” Raven says. “Something’s wrong with the console down here, he’s going to try the one at the top.”

“That one won’t work either,” she says, her blood chilling in her veins. “He’ll have to adjust it manually.”

“How do you know that?” Raven asks. “Clarke – why do you keep saying things you shouldn’t know?”

“We don’t have time to explain. I’m coming to you.”

“No, Clarke – “ Murphy says with frustration. “We still need to finish the restraints and load these rations if we’re going to survive long enough to figure out how to grow fucking algae. We need you here."

The revised clock says they have just over thirty minutes. Clarke stares at the numbers ticking down and swears before going over to help Murphy and Emori. She slams stacks of rations down on top of each other, the packets crinkling in their foil wrappers. Emori whispers something under her breath to Murphy. Clarke ignores them. Her head is buzzing.

Something will go wrong. Something always goes wrong.

Bellamy and Raven limp back into the lab, and it’s hard to tell which one of them is supporting the other. Clarke drops the stack of rations she was carrying and sprints to them just as they collapse together. Raven’s face is ashen, one of her hands clutching at her damaged leg, but when Clarke drops down to her knees to take a closer look Raven pushes her towards Bellamy.

“He fell, his mask cracked,” Raven says, and they undo Bellamy’s shattered helmet with shaking hands. His face is blistered like Clarke's hands, red instead of blue-black, and only one of his eyes flutters open to look blankly at her. His breath is weak and wet. Clarke turns him onto his side as he coughs, angling his face and neck so that the blood that comes up dribbles out the side instead of gathering in the back of his throat and choking him.

“Bellamy…” she says. She looks around wildly for Murphy or Emori, whichever is closest. “Get me the nightblood serum,” she demands.

“It won’t work immediately,” Raven reminds her, with tears trailing openly down both sides of her face.

“We have to try,” Clarke says, and when Murphy brings her the needle she stabs it into the side of Bellamy's neck. He makes a pained sound and starts coughing more, his hands scrambling weakly at her.

"It's okay," he says with blood trailing from the corner of his mouth, his one eye unfocused as he stares in her general direction. "Clarke, it's okay. I'll see you in the morning."

She kisses him and he’s too weak to kiss back. He’s dead by the time the rocket lifts off, but she has him strapped in at her side anyway, just in case, just in case –

When his head lolls against his chest and doesn’t rise again, Clarke stares at him instead of the apocalypse through the porthole window.

 

 

 

 

 

Clarke Griffin wakes up furious, though at least her hands are no longer burning in agony. The bed creaks as she climbs out and ignores the soft sounds of Niylah stirring. She stomps down the hallways of the bunker, dodging the few stragglers who are awake at this hour, and walks straight into Bellamy. He reaches out to balance her instinctively, his warm hand wrapping around her wrist. He lets go just as quickly. 

"What the fuck did you mean?" she demands. His eyes widen.

"What?"

"You said you'd see me in the morning."

For a moment neither of them dare to breathe. They are a collection of wax statues, nearly life-like, going through the motions of a human day.

"You remember?"

“Have you been repeating this day just like me?” Clarke asks, barely above a whisper. She doesn’t know what answer she wants. If he says yes – then she's not alone, then maybe she's not going crazy. If he says no then he’s seen her die as many times as she's had to watch him die, and she doesn’t – she wouldn’t wish that on anyone, much less –

“We have to go,” he says, shaking his head. “Come on, Raven’s waiting for us.”

“You  _are_  repeating it,” Clarke insists, following at his side.

“We can talk about it in the rover,” he says, but once they’re behind the wheel they don’t know what to say anymore.

“I had to watch you die,” Clarke says eventually, and she sees him flinch behind his visor.

“I had to take off without you,” he says dully. “That first time. That was the worst, because I thought it was permanent.”

“The dish was broken,” she explains.

“I know now,” he says ruefully. He turns to smile at her, and he doesn’t see the grounder that jumps out onto the road ahead of her. The body goes banging under the rover and Bellamy swerves into a tree. The other grounders swarm them and Clarke leaps out of the rover with her heart in her throat as Bellamy is dragged out.

“Wait, please,” she begs as hands scramble at Bellamy’s radiation suit. “Please, don’t do this – “

“It’s Wanheda!” one of them cries out, and that name never stops feeling like splinters under her fingernails. Someone wraps their arm around her neck and jerks her head back. The seal of her helmet stretches to its limit in their grasp. She kicks backwards, tries to stomp her heel into their feet, and they dodge all of her attempts and slam her head into the side of the rover for good measure. A vicious crack spiderwebs across the corner of her helmet and she wants to scream with frustration. These fucking helmets are  _shit_.

Bellamy is yelling for them to stop, a background cacophony of worry for Clarke, but it’s hard to pick out individual words over the roaring of her pulse in her ears. The grounder that has her captive forces her to her knees. She lets her legs collapse underneath her and scrambles weakly at the arm keeping her chin forced up.

“Drop your weapons,” an unfamiliar voice snarls. “Drop your weapons or we kill her.”

“They can’t – “ Clarke tries to wheeze. Bellamy’s silhouette swims in front of her eyes, but he’s handing everything over without a thought – his handgun, the spare ammunition in his pockets, the knives tucked into his boots, the handaxe tucked into the back of his belt.  _Idiot_ , she thinks to herself, even as she's impressed by the significant arsenal he managed to hide on himself. “They can’t kill me,” she manages to get out.

“I’m not watching you die again, Clarke,” Bellamy says, sounding nearly as strangled as her.

“ _Again_?” Murphy asks quietly from where he’s pinned to the ground with a sword to his neck.

Bellamy flinches when one of the grounders patting him down for extra weapons finds a butterfly knife hidden in a strap along his arm and cuffs him in the back of the helmet for not handing it over.

“Skaikru won’t let Wanheda die,” the grounder holding Clarke's neck up says confidently. “We’ll take her, we can use her to barter for spots in the bunker.”

“Absolutely not,” Bellamy says, stepping forward with a snarl.  _Goddammit, you’re unarmed_ , Clarke thinks to herself, dazed by the limited air her captor is allowing her. It’s almost a relief when the arm around her neck relaxes and rough hands haul her up by her suit instead.

“Just go, Bellamy,” she gasps out. “Call Harper and Monty, take care of Raven - if the rocket isn’t damaged, no one needs to go to the tower – “

“Is this some kind of code?” Murphy asks.

“Clarke – “ Bellamy starts, involuntarily trailing after her as the grounders drag her away.

“It’s okay – “ she promises, and then a heavy blow to the helmet makes the visor splinter further and knocks her unconscious. Clarke's last glimpse of him is refracted in a hundred tiny shards of glass.

She wakes up, hours later, to her mother’s hands frantically wiping blood away from her mouth and nostrils. The pool of black blood underneath Clarke's head tells her that the radiation exposure on the way to Polis doesn’t sit well with her stomach.

“Clarke, honey, how do you feel?” Abby asks. She pushes her back on her side when she tries to sit up, and Clarke hasn’t got the strength to fight her. Her face aches and burns.

“The nightblood might still work,” Clarke slurs, certain that at one point, it was very important to tell her this. “Mom, we have to pull in as many people as we can into the bunker, give everyone nightblood. We only have to stay here until the death wave – “

“Clarke,” her mother says, gently, her eyes shining with grief and unshed tears. “It’s already come.”

She cries herself back to sleep and the salt stings in every blister on her face.

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes they give up on outrunning the apocalypse for a day and go back to the beginning. It’s easy to slip away during the chaos that Octavia’s ultimatum to Skaikru causes, and every time they die Clarke feels a little more numb to the thought of her friends and mother and people worrying themselves over where they’ve disappeared to.

By late morning the ash has already started falling as gently as snow. The tiny green shoots that had sprung up in the gaps between scorched bones start to wither away from the incoming radiation. Underneath the yellowed leaves the skulls of a few hundred warriors glare balefully at them. 

Bellamy helps her climb up the last stretch of the dropship's height. It's easier to scramble up and sit down at his side when the slope evens out into the dropship's domed cap. From here Clarke can see the crater they left on the surrounding forest. The nearest trees are all blown back, their roots half-exposed in a surge of soil, their trunks blackened with soot. It's hard to tell what part of the damage is from the dropship's initial impact and what part is from the explosion she and Raven and Jasper set off.

Looking at the graveyard of bones exposed by the withered clover makes her sick to her stomach so she looks up instead, over the tops of the surrounding trees towards a brutal horizon. Praimfaya glows orange in the distance.

"Is this what you saw, the first time today happened?" Bellamy asks. He looks kind of pale, but that might just be the light refracting against the visor of his radiation suit.

"Yeah," Clarke says, as casually as she can manage. It's a lie. It looked a lot worse from the radio dish platform, because it was closer and more terrifying and she'd just watched her closest friends explode in the sky. But it seems kinder not to say all that, and she is trying very hard to be a kinder person.

"I can't believe I left you," he whispers.

Clarke doesn't want to talk about this, so she takes off her helmet. The release clicks beneath her fingers and air hisses through the crack. Bellamy makes a strangled sound of worry as her braid tumbles out down her back.

"It's fine," Clarke says, blinking away the sting at her eyes. "We have a while until the radiation becomes fatal. Besides, I brought lunch."

The skin on her knuckles cracks as she takes her gloves off and rummages in her pack. Bellamy hesitates until she takes out a few strips of smoked meat, a jar of tiny red tomatoes, and some cheese that starts to crumble in its cloth as she unwraps it and sets it on the slope of the dropship between them.

Bellamy takes off his own helmet. His nostrils flare at the initial sting of the radiation on his exposed skin and the first breath makes him cough. Clarke can feel the back of her own throat struggling with the air and it annoys her. She was really hoping to be able to taste their picnic before she starts vomiting up blood, but the universe won't give them nice things.

At least Bellamy will deteriorate faster than her, if this Nightblood stuff works. She doesn't want to die first and leave him alone. She's been the one who lives longest and it wasn't worth it.

They eat their picnic, each of them picking at it in small bites, as the roar of Praimfaya grows brighter and closer. It looks like a towering wall of flame, slowly sweeping the globe. Her knuckles start to bleed, and the Nightblood still looks weird to her - the blue-black of her skin, each fresh wound looking like a terrible bruise. She shifts closer to Bellamy. His face is starting to blister and he looks terrible. Clarke imagines she does too, but he still turns his head to look at her like he loves her, and hates himself for it.

That’s something they don’t really talk about. The urgency of imminent death loses its effect when you endure it so many times and part of Clarke wishes the danger still felt real because then maybe it would push them to actually  _talk_  about it, about what broke between them, about why he’s the only person she'd want to be trapped reliving this hell with.

"I want to kiss you again," she whispers instead. She doesn't care if her lips are cracked and bleeding and it'll hurt. She just knows this is where she wants to be, at the end of the world.

"You aimed a gun at me," he says, and Clarke pulls away because she thinks that probably means  _no_ , but his blistering, shaking hands fist in the collar of her suit and pull her closer. Clarke climbs into his lap and smashes their mouths together and it really is awful. They're dying and it hurts and she wants him and it's never the right time. He kisses her back anyway.

He's still kissing her as she gropes along his waistband and pulls out the gun in his belt. If he notices her press it between his third and fourth ribs, where the bullet will sever the aorta and give him a quick passing, he doesn't give any sign of it. She waits as long as she can until she tastes blood in his mouth, and then she pulls the trigger.

The irony is not lost on her.

Clarke lies back next to his body and her body is on the verge of pulmonary shutdown so she can't really scream at the sky like she wants to but she kicks her feet and slams her fists against the dome of the dropship until the metal is slippery with black blood and it's good enough for now.

She wanted more time, but not like this. 

 

 

 

 

 

This time when Clarke wakes up and makes her way to Bellamy, he grabs her by the wrist and drags her into the nearest room. The door clicks behind them and he crowds her up against it. 

"I am getting," he growls as he snaps a pair of handcuffs around her wrists and attaches her to a hook on the door before she can protest, " _Really_ fucking sick of you aiming guns at me."

Clarke rattles the handcuffs experimentally, but the hook keeps her hands pinned up above her head and she's not quite tall enough to slip the chain between the cuffs off. She eyes it, half impressed, half irritated. 

"And this is the second time you've handcuffed me, so I guess we're even now," she says.

"You're staying handcuffed until we can have a proper conversation," Bellamy says. He paces back and forth in front of her, his gesturing hands making sharp motions through the air. "No guns, no apocalypse, no whiskey."

"Sure," Clarke says, a little hysterically. "We have nothing but time!"

"None of...  _that_ , either," Bellamy says, waving vaguely. "For God's sake, Clarke. How long has it been since we had a real, honest conversation?"

_Too long._

"I don't know," she says, and she starts to cry, because she's not sure what Bellamy wants from her but she wants to give it but she can't give it if she doesn't know what it is and what if she hasn't got it anymore, what if this stupid fucking time loop is scraping her up on the inside and leaving her a hollow, hysterical - 

"Clarke - " Bellamy says, and then he starts to cry too.

"I'm sorry," Clarke says, and she's sorry for  _all_  of it. For closing the dropship door, for sending him to Mount Weather with the sharp bite of her fake apathy, for leaving him, for not coming home when he asked, for the breakdown of trust that put them on opposite sides of a battle. She says it all through choked breaths.

"I'm sorry too," Bellamy says and he crosses the room to embrace her in a few long strides. He buries his face in her hair like he did when they both found out the other was alive, after the dropship fire, after she escaped from Mount Weather, and Clarke presses the line of her body along his, trying to get as close as the handcuffs will allow. His hands are broad and blazing with heat against her back. She wants her hands on him too, she wants him to feel the burning trail of her touch like she does.

"Let me go, I want to kiss you," Clarke murmurs into his cheek, and he lifts up his head from the nest of her hair. His nose brushes hers as he stares at her eyes. She could kiss him so easily. His breath spills over her chin. Clarke already knows how he'd feel, how he'd taste, how he'd groan into her mouth if she closed the distance. But she needs Bellamy to trust her. She is not going to keep her sanity intact through the long, endless unraveling of the universe if they are not on the same side, so Clarke keeps still even as he removes one hand from the small of her back and tentatively cups her cheek with it. She doesn't lean into his palm. She doesn't whimper when his thumb drags along her bottom lip. 

"So kiss me," Bellamy dares her.

"You broke up with me," she retorts.

"You aimed a gun at me," he reminds her. "And back then, as far as we knew, murder was permanent."

“I didn’t pull the trigger,” she says, the same thing she said the first time. Bellamy’s unimpressed, flat smile tells her it’s not going to be enough this time. Clarke slams her head back against the metal door. The impact makes her teeth ache. "What do you want, Bellamy?" she asks, trying not to let her frustration seep into her voice. 

"Ask,” he says.

“Kiss me,” she says, holding her chin up defiantly and hoping she doesn’t sound like she's begging. She's begged enough, when she thought there was no other choice, but the idea that they might be stuck here together for the rest of eternity with nothing but the ongoing memory of all the ways they’ve hurt each other makes her a little resistant.

Bellamy steps closer.

“Why?” he murmurs. His hand comes up and trails along her jaw. Clarke shivers.

"Just to get it out of our system,” she says, like an idiot, instead of the truth, instead of  _I miss you so much I’m kind of glad you’re in hell with me_  or  _I love you, I’m sorry, I never should have done the things that I’ve done_ , or  _I forgave you, once, at the base of a tree with blood on our hands, when I didn’t know you, and I know you now, and I want your forgiveness now, I want it all –_

Clarke sees Bellamy’s eyes shutter in pain.

It was the wrong answer, but she's still burning with anger that he gave up all his weapons, that he put himself in danger for her.

Bellamy stares at her for a while. His palm is pressed into the cold metal door beside her head, and she can feel the warmth of his wrist so close to her cheek.

“Bellamy,” she says quietly. “We can go back to saving the world tomorrow. Today, can we just… can we just have this? I want you.”

“Just to get it out of our system,” he repeats, his tone sharp and sarcastic, and she flinches. Did it hurt him to hear it as much as it hurts her? Before Clarke can ask, he takes the remaining half-step forward and smooths his hand along her cheek. She tilts her mouth up greedily as he presses his thigh into the cradle of her hips and his other arm slips around her back, pulling her flush with him.

Clarke kisses him as long as he lets her, straining against the handcuffs keeping her arms pinned. She wants to hold him like she used to. They had so little time together, so little opportunity to see what love could mean together when they weren’t trying to keep people alive.

“Let me go,” she murmurs into his mouth.

“Why?” Bellamy asks.

“Because I want to hold you,” Clarke says, sounding wrecked, and maybe that’s a good enough answer right now because Bellamy unhooks her wrists and releases the lock. They let the cuffs fall away, clattering to the floor as she throws her arms around him and kisses him again. Her weight makes them both stumble backwards, onto the couch. Clarke ends up in his lap, kissing his jaw, scrambling at his shirt and his belt. His hands, equally desperate, don’t rest until they're both mostly naked and out of breath, curled together on the couch.

She reaches for his hand. He hesitates for a moment, and then gives it to her. Clarke squeezes his fingers gratefully.

"What day would you repeat, if you could choose?" she asks.

"The day everyone got high on Jobi nuts," Bellamy says sleepily. “I’m sorry we missed most of it.”

Jobi nuts aren’t the part of that day that stand out the most to her, but she cracks a smile anyway. It makes her warm, that he would pick a day he spent mostly with her.

"Dax might still be feeling murder-y,” Clarke jokes.

"We'd get him high too,” Bellamy says with barely a hint of hesitation.

"Sounds like a pain,” she says with a laugh, burying her face in Bellamy’s shoulder. She kisses the freckles there and presses her cheek against him before fondly reaching up to push some hair out of his eyes. “Having to foil attempted murder every single morning."

"Easier than an entire apocalypse."

The warmth leaves Clarke, and does not return for the rest of the day.

 

 

 

 

 

"You know what I like about Praimfaya?" Clarke asks distractedly, watching the last flock of birds try to flee across the sky. 

"What?" Bellamy asks. This time they took a detour on their way to the dropship to pick up some whiskey from that half-buried car she and Wells and Finn took shelter in, a million lifetimes ago. Bellamy holds the neck of the bottle loosely between three fingers and takes a swig. They are starting to take that detour more and more often, and Clarke thinks she should say something, but she was secretly glad when Bellamy turned the steering wheel towards it this morning without asking.

"No levers," she says.

It's not supposed to be that funny, but Bellamy laughs so hard that he slides down the domed cap of the dropship and breaks his neck in the fall, and when Clarke looks down at the angle of his body she figures she may as well end the day early too.

 

 

 

 

 

Clarke Griffin wakes up next to Niylah and doesn't bother saying goodbye to her before walking out and finding Bellamy halfway between their rooms.  

"It wasn't that funny," is the first thing she says to him in a fairly accusing tone, much to the confusion of a passing stranger.

Bellamy just shrugs. 

"Wanna try and save the world this time?" he asks, and Clarke agrees because trying to drink themselves to death before their skin starts blistering is getting kind of old and they may as well change it up.

It’s been a while since they actually put some effort into surviving the death wave, so naturally, it takes them several tries to remind themselves of the fragile timeline. The future stretches out before them like the roots of a tree, twisting and branching off in the blink of an eye, pruned back before the clock can get too far ahead. She and Bellamy walk a tightrope between those futures, trying to stay ahead of the dangers that snap at their heels.

Allowing the initial grounder ambush to happen doesn’t leave them with enough time to prepare the rocket, even if they radio Raven to start her pre-flight checks before they’ve left Polis, so they can’t afford to lose time there, but they decide that a several hour detour to meet up with Harper and Monty is worth the cost of every minute.

A careful word and a significant glance to Harper sends her to lurk over Raven’s shoulder as she works, and Harper’s soft and firm brand of empathy convinces Raven to take a breather just before her frantic last-minute adjustments to the rocket go wrong. The communications system doesn’t blow up in her face, and Raven’s confident this means they can start the power in the ring from within the rocket.

Bellamy gets that familiar twitch in his jaw when Clarke argues that she can afford to expose her hands to the radiation more than Monty can, but she's right – and she's had a long time to think about it – so he doesn’t try to stop her from following Murphy to the lighthouse bunker, though he does look pained every time she returns with blistered, blackened hands.

Emori helps Clarke strap into her seat in the rocket when her hands are too ruined to fasten the restraints. She gives Clarke's hands a significant look and says, “Now you understand,” before settling into her own seat on the opposite side of the cockpit. Bellamy takes the spot on Clarke's left and closes his eyes when Raven begins the takeoff sequence. Clarke watches the hangar bay doors close with a rumble and a feeling in her stomach that is halfway between zero-g nausea and just regular nausea.

She's on the wrong side of those doors more often than she's not, which is why Bellamy can’t look at them anymore.

Clarke reaches out to the side blindly, her blistered skin sending spasms of pain up her arm wherever her gloves brush the side of the rocket. Bellamy reaches for her instinctively as the rocket rumbles beneath them, hesitating at the last minute when he remembers her hands. Clarke doesn’t care. She grabs for him anyway and hangs on through the pain.

The take off rattles all the teeth in her head. Clarke can hear Raven’s panicked breathing over the groan of metal and the ignition of fuel beneath them, and part of her wants to tell her to conserve her breath because they can buy her time but not more air, but if they die up in the ring – hey, whatever, they can try again and again and again. Not like they’ve got anything better to do.

Clarke starts laughing hysterically as the Earth grows smaller and smaller in the porthole window, until she can see the curve of it, until she can watch the death wave smother one continent after another. She thought it was big and awful and terrifying from the ground, from its warpath. It’s worse from the sky, but less personal. She looks at the Earth burning up and feels her brain settle into that calm, numb state it goes in when there's a patient on the table that she's not sure she can save. It’s the state of mind a doctor needs to cut off limbs and cauterize wounds without flinching and dig out an infection without the urge to retch.

Bellamy is staring out the porthole window with a hollow look on his face too, but Clarke knows he’s lived enough guilt for a hundred lifetimes or more. She squeezes his hand through the pain until he looks away from it and at her smile instead. Clarke is a very good liar by now; she has had lots of practice to convince people that things will turn out okay, that she knows something they don’t and she has it under control.

There’s no one on this planet – or in orbit around it – that can tell when she's lying more easily than Bellamy.

Clarke pushes the burning Earth out of her mind and focuses on the future, on Raven’s spacewalk, on helping her guide the rocket pod into the ring. They all tumble out in a pile of adrenaline and relief and the lightheadedness that comes with reduced oxygen. Clarke is useless now, with her hands. She's done her part, so she just unhooks her oxygen and gives it to Emori to give to Raven while Monty and the others scramble to install the oxygenator.

The air, when it comes, is the sweetest thing they've ever tasted. Nevermind that it’s stale and artificial and for a few glorious months they got to breathe in the scent of a forest all around them. Clarke and Bellamy have spent most of the last eternity in their goddamn radiation suits, breathing recycled air or breathing in the apocalypse. Clarke starts to cry on the floor of the ark and Bellamy cradles her head in his lap.

“I want it to be over,” she says between sobs. “I want to try tomorrow now.”

“I know,” he says, pressing kisses to her forehead. “Me too, I know, god – “

This is the furthest they’ve ever gotten. It has to count for something.

“Bellamy,” she gasps, still giddy from their near-suffocation. “I love you – “

“I love you too,” he whispers against her skin, and it’s wonderful until Murphy throws his helmet at them.

 

 

 

 

 

Clarke Griffin wakes up and stares at a metal ceiling. Someone is breathing quietly beside her, the slow rhythm of air telling her they're still asleep. She hesitates before turning her head to see who it is.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up to you to decide whether the metal ceiling in the last morning is in the second dawn bunker as the beginning of yet another loop, or if it's the ceiling in the Ark and they broke out of it.
> 
> I'm not particularly pleased with this but hey if I didn't post it now, I wasn't ever going to. Echo is... somewhere? Idk. I don't hate her but if they were making an effort to avoid the grounder ambush so that they had enough time to take off, I didn't really know where to add her to the ensemble and wasn't motivated enough to find a solution. *shrug emoji*
> 
> Title modified from the 1964 film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. I do not recommend watching the movie because it's "a product of its time" and will probably make you angry, but the title's catchy.


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